Do Christians believe that Christianity is the only true religion?

Do Christians believe that Christianity is the only true religion?

  • Yes, Christians believe that there is only 1 true religion, and it is Christianity.

  • No, Christians believe that there are 2 equally correct religions, Judaism and Christianity.

  • No, Christians believe that there are 3 equally correct religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

  • No, Christians believe that there are many equally correct religions, including Christianity.


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I have a basic issue with the OP. I'm not sure the distinction between true religion and false religion is quite the right one, nor is Christianity a single thing (or for that matter most other religions). I think Jesus was the only way in which God appeared directly in human history. So there's one important thing in Christianity that is true and not true in other religions. But that doesn't mean that all forms of Christianity are superior in all respects to all forms of other religions, even when judged by Jesus' standards. Ideally, Christianity would be the best place for anyone to encounter God, but in practice it may well depend upon the person and their situation.
Thank you. I think you and others are right to advise me on a more nuanced approach. This poll has worked well to get a basic sorting into categories, and perhaps ideas like yours would be good for a second iteration, to fine-tune the results.

I think, though, that from the things you have said option 1 is in the right spirit, expressing the general attitude of most Christians, even if not in the most precise of ways.

Thank you for your answer!
 
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RDKirk

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Hello RDKirk. I'm just trying to gather information. You don't have to answer, but I'd be grateful if you could.
The reason is because another user, a Christian, informed me that all religions were equally valid. I had a suspicion that most Christians don't agree that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and the many other religions are as valid as Christianity, so I thought I'd test it.

I'm just pointing out that I see that you are merely playing a game with Christians for your own amusement, not for any edification.
 
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I'm just pointing out that I see that you are merely playing a game with Christians for your own amusement, not for any edification.
What game would this be? If you look through the thread all you will see is me asking a question. A number of people have been kind enough to answer it, some with helpful comments. Occasionally I have disagreed with them about the poll a little, but on the whole this has been a remarkably civil thread.
As for me, all I'm here to do is test an idea, as I told you. I'm pleased to see it has been borne out, and grateful to all those who have answered.
If you want to play a game, you may have to wait.
 
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Inkfingers

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Christianity says that nobody gets to the Kingdom of Heaven except by trust in and fidelity to the Logos, and that whether we have such trust and fidelity in the Logos is decided by the Father and given to us in an act of grace.

Any religious expression which acknowledges that is true.
 
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cloudyday2

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None of this weakens my case in any way, I'm afraid. These people you see as being sympathetic towards Jews and Judaism - how many of them suggest it would be a good idea to stop being a Christian and instead become a Jew? None of them, of course. No matter the respect for Jews and Judaism, its place in Christian history and its shared values, Judaism is seen as best as an incomplete and unformed relative to the Christian religion and at worst - as it has very often been over the course of Christianity's history - as actively hostile to Jesus, the "Christ Killers". No serious Christians suggest that the Jews are right when they say that Jesus was not resurrected and was not the Son of God, and nobody really sees Judaism and Christianity as equally correct. Which is, of course, what the poll, small and humble though it be, shows.
The Catholics, Orthodox and Lutherans who you mentioned are feeling shamed by the Holocaust (I'm sure you know that Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite), and a lot of the American support for Israel is due to the more extreme Protestant sects who see Israel as a key element in their Rapture-Ready End Times prophecies in which many Jews will convert to be Christians.
True, and anytime a body of data is reduced to a couple of numbers (like an average and standard deviation) there will be information lost and the results can be misleading.

I see a lot of members here who describe themselves as "messianic". I also see a lot of Christian teachers who speak of the importance of understanding Judaism's festivals and laws in order to understand the Gospels and New Testament. The poll results imply that Judaism is on par with Islam or Buddhism in the eyes of most Christians, and that is misleading.

But maybe it doesn't seem misleading to others.
 
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hedrick

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True, and anytime a body of data is reduced to a couple of numbers (like an average and standard deviation) there will be information lost and the results can be misleading.

I see a lot of members here who describe themselves as "messianic". I also see a lot of Christian teachers who speak of the importance of understanding Judaism's festivals and laws in order to understand the Gospels and New Testament. The poll results imply that Judaism is on par with Islam or Buddhism in the eyes of most Christians, and that is misleading.

But maybe it doesn't seem misleading to others.
Attitudes are a bit hard to describe. The posting you respond to says "Judaism is seen as best as an incomplete and unformed relative to the Christian." Sort of. Anything that doesn't acknowledge Jesus as the son of God is by definition wrong in that respect. But the quoted wording seems to imply that Judaism as somehow not all there. I don't feel that way. It's hard to know how other Christians feel. When I was in high school our adult Sunday School class liked to have scholars as teachers. Since we were located in a city with a major Jewish seminary and no Christian one, that meant we often had Jewish scholars. I was never given the impression growing up that Judaism is incomplete, nor do I sense that now in my own church.

It's true, however, that Judaism (at least today) has the concept of a righteous Gentile. In principle Islam accepts people of the book, though in practice how that is carried out seems to vary. Christianity historically hasn't had a similar way of dealing with non-Christians who are acceptable to God. Indeed for much of its history that was explicitly denied. Today I think at least half of Christians are inclusivists, meaning that at least some non-Christians are saved. But there's not an account of that that's widely accepted. The Catholic position seems to be that they are virtual Christians. Mainline Protestants are also inclusivists, but don't (as far as I know) have an official account of how that is.

[I have to go out for a bit. I'll continue later.]
 
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hedrick

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The reason traditional Christianity finds it challenging to have the equivalent of the righteous Gentile seems obvious. At least since Augustine, most Christians have believed that people are born damned, and Jesus is the only way to avoid eternal torment. The current Catholic view seems to be that it’s possible some people would have faith in Christ if they knew what he was, and that they are sort of virtual Christians, who are saved by Christ.

I haven’t heard such an explicit argument from inclusivist Protestants, but they’d have to believe something close to that unless that abandon the idea that we need to be saved in order to avoid hell.

My impression is that current mainline Christians don’t always believe in damnation by default. That make inclusivism easier, but opens the questions of why Christ died. I’ve recently been reading a systematic theology by Douglas Ottati. He is one of the current theologians of my church (the PCUSA). He suggests that while Christ is the human presence of the Logos, the Logos is not limited to working through him. Similarly, C S Lewis, and various posters in CF have suggested that while Christ is the place we should look if we want to see God’s activity, God is not limited to calling us through explicit faith in Christ. Interestingly, Ottati connects this with the “extra calvinisticum.” That was a concept that was important in Lutheran / Reformed disagreements about communion. He says it is “the doctrine that, before, during, and after the incarnation, the eternal Son, Logos, or second person of the Trinity continues his operations also beyond the flesh (etiam extra carnem) of the man Jesus. As the nineteenth-century Reformed theologian I. A. Dorner explains, the Logos “also eternally is and remains omnipresently active outside the humanity and its limitation.””
 
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chilehed

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Does Christianity claim to be the one true religion?
There needs to be an option to vote "Other".

All (at least, many or perhaps even most) religions have some elements of truth in them. Some more, some less. I'd say that a religion is true to the extent that it agrees with the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
 
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Aussie Pete

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AussiePeter, you have given a thoughtful and interesting answer, and I thank you for it.
I don't want to seem facetious, but I do see a problem here.
Beginning with Islam: the things you have said are certainly matters to think about. But really, what does it matter if Mohammed and his people did all the things you say they did? If Allah is the one true God, then Muhammed must have had good reason to do what he did. And I must say, I have heard Muslims speak about Allah, and they paint a rather different picture of Muhammed than this.

And then how about Hinduism? Should I look in to that as well? I mean, this is the fate of my eternal soul we're talking about here. If I'm wrong about Hinduism, I could end up as a worm in my next life, which sounds a horrible existence.

And the problem is, there are a great many other religions, and it seems to me that all of them claim to be true, and I would have a hard job proving that any of them are wrong. Indeed, if they claim divine revelation, I don't see how I could prove any of them to be wrong.

And then, back to Christianity - how logn should I wait while testing it? Supposing I do as you say, and nothing happens? Supposing I pray devoutly to God but I hear nothing back from Him. How long should I wait until I try out my next religion? A week? A year? A score of years? It's beginning to look as if one lifetime might not be enough to explore one religion, never mind all the ones I will have to check.

So you see, this is by way of leading me to the Shell Problem that I started a thread on recently
Religion is a cosmic shell game
I haven't meant to lead you up the garden path, and am grateful for you taking the time to answer my question. But I cannot see that it helps me much. Rather, it leaves me with more trouble than I had before.
Yes, I understand your dilemma. My father was an atheist. He studied just about every religion and ended up rejecting them all. Possibly this was because he despised all authority.

Only one faith offers salvation. No Muslim is certain of eternal life, apart from those who kill and maim others in the name of Allah. No Hindu or Buddhist, Sikh or Shinto devotee, no Confucian even knows what eternal life is.

Religions have a a few things in common. They have a dead founder, a "Holy" book, many rules to follow and the best of intentions. Except for Christianity.

Christians follow the Living Lord Jesus. It is a fact of history that Jesus lived, died and rose again. Mohamed and Buddha are dead and buried. Jesus came back from the dead to prove that what He said about Himself was true. One of the better known Christian writers, Professor CS Lewis, said that the reason he believed was quite simple. It's true.

For some mystifying (to me) reason, many people just want something to believe in other than themselves. Whether it is true or not seems irrelevant. I've spoken to many people who chose their religion as if was an item of clothing to put on. If what Jesus said is true, then we do well to take serious notice. It is truly life and death, not just for now but for eternity. May I suggest that you read the gospel of John? It was written for the exact purpose of helping people like yourself come to know the truth.
 
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To be truly free requires real choices. God gave that choice to Adam, with a serious warning. It was not that God left Adam without any guidance or instruction. Adam was told the consequences of a bad decision.

There comes a time in a child's life when you can no longer make every decision for them. I am delighted with the decisions that my son has made, not so much my daughter. They were free to choose. I fathered individuals, not robots. That's what God created, children, not robotic slaves.
 
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Moral Orel

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To be truly free requires real choices. God gave that choice to Adam, with a serious warning. It was not that God left Adam without any guidance or instruction. Adam was told the consequences of a bad decision.

There comes a time in a child's life when you can no longer make every decision for them. I am delighted with the decisions that my son has made, not so much my daughter. They were free to choose. I fathered individuals, not robots. That's what God created, children, not robotic slaves.
Okay, so why not make people that freely make good choices every time?
 
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cloudyday2

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The reason traditional Christianity finds it challenging to have the equivalent of the righteous Gentile seems obvious. At least since Augustine, most Christians have believed that people are born damned, and Jesus is the only way to avoid eternal torment. The current Catholic view seems to be that it’s possible some people would have faith in Christ if they knew what he was, and that they are sort of virtual Christians, who are saved by Christ.

I haven’t heard such an explicit argument from inclusivist Protestants, but they’d have to believe something close to that unless that abandon the idea that we need to be saved in order to avoid hell.

My impression is that current mainline Christians don’t always believe in damnation by default. That make inclusivism easier, but opens the questions of why Christ died. I’ve recently been reading a systematic theology by Douglas Ottati. He is one of the current theologians of my church (the PCUSA). He suggests that while Christ is the human presence of the Logos, the Logos is not limited to working through him. Similarly, C S Lewis, and various posters in CF have suggested that while Christ is the place we should look if we want to see God’s activity, God is not limited to calling us through explicit faith in Christ. Interestingly, Ottati connects this with the “extra calvinisticum.” That was a concept that was important in Lutheran / Reformed disagreements about communion. He says it is “the doctrine that, before, during, and after the incarnation, the eternal Son, Logos, or second person of the Trinity continues his operations also beyond the flesh (etiam extra carnem) of the man Jesus. As the nineteenth-century Reformed theologian I. A. Dorner explains, the Logos “also eternally is and remains omnipresently active outside the humanity and its limitation.””

A couple of other strategies that might allow a Christian to label Judaism as another 100% true religion are these:
- argue that Judaism is for the children of Israel only, so ethnic Jews should practice Judaism but others shouldn't
- argue that Judaism is a religion primarily of rituals and morals and rules while Christianity is a religion of hopes and creeds

Judaism has no creeds except maybe the belief in one God. The rejection of Jesus as the Messiah is not part of any official Jewish creed as far as I know, so there is no incoherency in claiming that both Judaism and Christianity are 100% true. Jews don't proselytize and usually consider Judaism to be a duty resulting from their ethnicity. It's an entirely different kind of religion from Christianity, and there are hundreds of thousands of devout Jews who are also devout Christians. ( Messianic Judaism - Wikipedia )

The primary problem with reconciling the two religions is monotheism. The fact that Jesus of Nazareth didn't fulfill all the promises of the Jewish Messiah is not a problem, because Christianity believes in a Second Coming where this fulfillment will happen. The real problem is the apparent non-monotheism of the Trinity, but that can be overcome.

(Obviously this coexistence doesn't work if a person understands Judaism or Christianity in other ways.)
 
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Yes, I understand your dilemma. My father was an atheist. He studied just about every religion and ended up rejecting them all. Possibly this was because he despised all authority.

Only one faith offers salvation. No Muslim is certain of eternal life, apart from those who kill and maim others in the name of Allah. No Hindu or Buddhist, Sikh or Shinto devotee, no Confucian even knows what eternal life is.

Religions have a a few things in common. They have a dead founder, a "Holy" book, many rules to follow and the best of intentions. Except for Christianity.

Christians follow the Living Lord Jesus. It is a fact of history that Jesus lived, died and rose again. Mohamed and Buddha are dead and buried. Jesus came back from the dead to prove that what He said about Himself was true. One of the better known Christian writers, Professor CS Lewis, said that the reason he believed was quite simple. It's true.

For some mystifying (to me) reason, many people just want something to believe in other than themselves. Whether it is true or not seems irrelevant. I've spoken to many people who chose their religion as if was an item of clothing to put on. If what Jesus said is true, then we do well to take serious notice. It is truly life and death, not just for now but for eternity. May I suggest that you read the gospel of John? It was written for the exact purpose of helping people like yourself come to know the truth.
You say, "You should believe in my religion because it has this or that special feature," but you're overlooking two points. First, every religion says that their religion is special. Second, it does not matter how special your religion is unless we can show that it is actually true.
Essentially, all you're saying is that I should believe in your religion because it's right. Which is, of course, what every religious believer is telling me.
I've read the Gospel of John, and didn't find it convincing, I'm afraid.
 
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Aussie Pete

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You say, "You should believe in my religion because it has this or that special feature," but you're overlooking two points. First, every religion says that their religion is special. Second, it does not matter how special your religion is unless we can show that it is actually true.
Essentially, all you're saying is that I should believe in your religion because it's right. Which is, of course, what every religious believer is telling me.
I've read the Gospel of John, and didn't find it convincing, I'm afraid.
OK, last resort. Ask God to show you the truth. God has saved many atheists. A friend of mine prayed and said that he wasn't even sure that God existed, but if He was real, to help him. He was not sleeping in spite of some really heavy duty sleep medication. He went to sleep after that prayer, the first time for weeks. His medication was still in the bottle. Then the "just so happened" began, which is actually God doing miracles. I won't take up your time with the events, but suffice to say that God answered my friend's prayer in ways that defy the idea of coincidence.
 
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OK, last resort. Ask God to show you the truth. God has saved many atheists. A friend of mine prayed and said that he wasn't even sure that God existed, but if He was real, to help him. He was not sleeping in spite of some really heavy duty sleep medication. He went to sleep after that prayer, the first time for weeks. His medication was still in the bottle. Then the "just so happened" began, which is actually God doing miracles. I won't take up your time with the events, but suffice to say that God answered my friend's prayer in ways that defy the idea of coincidence.
It seems to me that here, on a debating forum which exists "for non-Christians to challenge the Christian faith, and for Christians to defend their faith" I am the one offering arguments for my position, and you are the one unable to answer them. All you can say in response is that you are, quite simply, right, and that I should believe you.
Look at it from my perspective. Of course, I have no reason to think that you are being dishonest. But there are a great many representatives of a great many religions, all of them mutually exclusive, all saying the same thing as you. Quibbling about one minor differences between them is just that: quibbling. In essence, they are all the same. They all claim to be right, they all claim to be important, and they all say that they must be taken on faith.
Logically, there's no course of action available to me. Because Religion is a cosmic shell game
 
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cloudyday2

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To me it seems better to say: "assuming Christianity's afterlife claims are true, discovering the truth of those claims with so many religions to choose from is like a cosmic shell game."

Putting on my Christian hat, I would agree that it is like a shell game except for one scenario. If a Christian can grow extremely close to Jesus/God in this life then the afterlife claims can be known to be true because they are coming from such a trusted source. A person would need to be so close to God that he/she trusts not merely in a vague higher power but a specific Christian God who backs the specific claims of some sect of Christianity.
 
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To me it seems better to say: "assuming Christianity's afterlife claims are true, discovering the truth of those claims with so many religions to choose from is like a cosmic shell game."

Putting on my Christian hat, I would agree that it is like a shell game except for one scenario. If a Christian can grow extremely close to Jesus/God in this life then the afterlife claims can be known to be true because they are coming from such a trusted source. A person would need to be so close to God that he/she trusts not merely in a vague higher power but a specific Christian God who backs the specific claims of some sect of Christianity.
Quite true! Experience of contact with God is good evidence, although if you find that God never does or says anything more than things an imaginary person could do, you might want to consider an alternative possibility.
However, in our scenario here, we're considering a person who has no experience of any religion, and all religions are saying the same, mutually incomaptible, things.
 
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cloudyday2

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Quite true! Experience of contact with God is good evidence, although if you find that God never does or says anything more than things an imaginary person could do, you might want to consider an alternative possibility.
However, in our scenario here, we're considering a person who has no experience of any religion, and all religions are saying the same, mutually incomaptible, things.
Assuming Christian claims are true it is even worse than a shell game, because there are hints in the NT that only "the elect" have any hope of salvation. Jesus sows seed in his earthly ministry knowing that some soil is good and some soil is bad. If a person is bad and does not "have ears to hear" the message of the Jesus then he/she has no chance. I guess that gets into the question of defining freewill.
 
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